Here's a vote for Budgie if you're able to include it as an option in future.

Last I checked, Budgie wasn't ready for BSD - I don't know the current status of the project but I use it as a daily driver in several of my GNU+Linux boxes and I'm really taken with it. Next to Mate it's the only DE I've ever found with the right combination of eye-candy and performance. There's some argument that Budgie (daft name, if you ask me) is for higher end machines but I've run it without issue on some fairly modest hardware. Horses for courses, naturally.

I gather that Lumia is the preferred option for some BSD purists because of the permissive license but that's got a lot of work to do before it can call itself a real competitor. I wear many hats, but as a user, I find Lumia is clumsy and looks like something that is rooted in the 1990s. Hard to imagine that with all the eye-candy that's around today (including some excellent icon sets) they went with a design that looks (to me) like the ### child of GEM and Windows 95. (Yes, I'm that old..., older in fact)

For me: and this is purely personal opinion, it's got the effective eye-candy of KDE without all the clutter of KDE but with all the actual user-friendliness and resource preservation that XFCE and Mate both have. Anyone who hasn't tried it should try it in a virtual machine - I'm fond of the Solus project myself which birthed Budgie but there are several GNU+Linux distros that offer it now.

Looks like a bit of a false start (I was looking for a silicone boobie joke there but failed to get it going, much like that porting attempt).

I'm happy to put some hours in the moment I can get this workstation on Ghost 11.1 - I'm locked into Torvalds indulgence right now: boy I'm full of loathing at the moment for that... must be something I ate with my Gnu.

Anyway... if anyone can tell me how to get moving with this, I'll certainly give it a shot: not guaranteeing I'll manage it but people say that Ports are pretty easy. Of course, everything is easy once you're an expert at it.

well, could sympathize with Budgie as well, as it gives me the menue structure of XFCE, the same look and feel with the sub menues and (hopefully) the same stability as my XFCE has under GhostBSD (!) right now, not comparable with that under SuSe Linux, where disappearing mouse cursor and sudden logoffs are a pain in the *** with XFCE!
will have a look at Solus as well...